Death Of A Salesman-Research paper
the proviso that she has uncovered during the poem’s creation. This knowledge,
galvanized by the necessity of the final line’s “Write it!” leaves the one
art’s efficaciousness in serious doubt.
In the poem’s opening line, Bishop implicitly trusted that, with each successive
loss, she would become hardened to its consequences; the replication
of the villanelle’s form, however, has the opposite result. Instead of inuring
the poet to its effects, each reiteration of the word “disaster” heightens loss’s
impact and demonstrates that disaster has actually mastered her.
—JONATHAN SIRCY, University of Kentucky
NOTE
1. David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell,
ed. with a preface by Robert Hemenway and afterword by James Merrill (New York: Farrar,
1989).
WORK CITED
Bishop, Elizabeth. “One Art.” The Complete Poems 1927–1979. Farrar, 1979. 178.
Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Critics have long emphasized the symbolic importance of the main setting
in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, explaining how the small home of
Willy and Linda Loman—once situated on the green fringes of suburbia and
blessed with shade trees, a backyard garden, and plenty of open space for two
rambunctious sons—has become palisaded by ruthless urban sprawl, so much
so that the aging couple now live in the sterilizing shadows of high-rise apartment
buildings, trapped, cornered, enveloped: “The way they boxed us in
here. Bricks and windows, windows and bricks” (Miller 17). Likewise, many
readers have pointed out the significance of first names in the play, how the
three Loman men still employ their boyhood cognomens, whereas Bernard—
the most successful male in the play—never, not even in childhood, uses a
diminutive form of his name. Moreover, much has been made of the expensive
wire recorder that Willy accidentally jostles when he goes into the office
of his young supervisor to request a desk job with the company; its mechanical
chattering and mystifying complexity symbolize how innovative technology
and new ways of doing business have passed Willy by, have left the weary
salesman adrift in a bewildering sea of change: “Shut it off! Shut it off!”
(Miller 83).
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However, there is a subtle but telling bit of symbolism that has, for the most
part, gone unremarked, fleeting and unnoticed. Yet, it contributes an extra
layer of meaning to the overall theme of Miller’s celebrated tragedy about an
aging and mediocre salesman who will not grow up, but who will instead
remain an impulsive and “mercurial” boy groping ineffectually for success in
a world that pays him no heed (Miller 12). And that symbol is facial hair—
who has it and who does not.
Aside from his under-achieving sons, Biff and Happy, the two most important
males in Willy’s life are both deceased: they are his biological father, who
is never named, and Benjamin, Willy’s successful and sophisticated older
brother, a man of gold and diamonds and faraway places. Mentioned often and
with godlike veneration, the barely remembered father never actually appears
in the play, while the much-revered, often-consulted Benjamin appears solely
in Willy’s nostalgic daydreams. Although neither man is related in great detail,
both of these adult males—idolized in Willy’s youth and now lionized in his
memories—are described as sporting handsome facial hair. Early in act 1, for
example, Benjamin makes his initial appearance when Willy conjures him up
in one of his extravagant reveries. The well-traveled sibling is depicted as “a
stolid man, in his sixties, with a mustache and an authoritative air” (Miller 44).
He is almost the same age as the indecisive and self-doubting Willy, but in
marked contrast, the urbane, immaculately dressed older brother “is utterly certain
of his destiny, and there is an aura of far places about him” (44).
Unlike Willy, Benjamin—in his six decades of living—has made a name
for himself, has become rich and successful, prosperous and confident: “Why,
boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twentyone
I walked out. [. . .] And by God I was rich” (Miller 48). He represents
everything that Willy has always dreamed of being—a robust, take-charge
man, a chieftain, rugged and manly, sure of himself, fearless in all situations,
be they social or financial. According to Thomas E. Porter in “Acres of Diamonds,”
the indefatigable Benjamin “is the robber baron, the captain of industry”
(29). And as such, he is a larger-than-life figure to the worshipful Willy,
who views Ben as an adventurous world-tamer cut from the same prime
leather as Teddy Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes, and J. P. Morgan—complete with
a splendid mustache to evidence his potent virility (he has seven sons) and his
secure manhood. In short, the older brother’s personal energy and infectious
elan light up every room he enters. According to Willy, this accomplished and
charismatic sibling is “the only man I ever met who knew the answers”
(Miller 45). In Benjamin Loman, the struggling and insecure salesman sees
the embodiment of “the mystery of success, the Eleusinian rite known only to
initiates” (Porter 30). The dashing, mustache-sporting older brother is also the
only character in the entire play who respectfully addresses Willy by his formal
name—“So you’re William”—and not by the childish diminutive that
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most men in their sixties would have outgrown, would have long since discarded
as anachronistic, if not downright demeaning (Miller 47).
In the golden nimbus of one of his reveries about past days, better days,
Willy implores the visiting Benjamin to describe the Loman family tree to
young Biff and Happy to “let them know the kind of stock they spring from”
(Miller 48). In particular, Willy wants his polished and successful brother to
educate the boys about their late paternal grandfather—the barely remembered
adventurer who left for exotic Alaska when Willy was but a toddler.
Willy profoundly regrets his own male-poor childhood, one that offered no
available father figure to teach him to become a man, to guide and instruct him
in the complicated ways of the world: “Please tell about Dad. [. . .] All I
remember is a man with a big beard, and I was in Mamma’s lap, sitting around
a fire, and some kind of high music” (48). Thus, Willy’s late father—like
Benjamin—boasted plenty of facial hair, marking himself as a mature adult
male who, “following the Yukon gold-strike,” went north to seek his fortune
in the untamed wilderness of a frozen and dangerous frontier (Porter 29).
Whenever the dream-loving Willy casts his thoughts backward into the lake
of memory, he pictures the two most influential men in his life with impressive
facial adornments, yet he himself never grows so much as a whisker,
never exhibits, like an ancient Spartan male, the facial hair of a man, of a
grown warrior.
Willy and his two sons, Biff, age thirty-four, and Happy, age thirty-two, are
presented throughout the play as perpetual adolescents, woefully unable—or
unwilling—to make the big leap from carefree childhood to responsible adulthood.
In act 1, Biff—the only introspective member of this immature threesome–-shares
his regrets and insecurities with his younger brother as, in their
old upstairs bedroom, they smoke cigarettes, brag of their sexual conquests,
and ponder vague and uncertain futures: “Maybe that’s my trouble. I’m like a
boy. I’m not married, I’m not in business, I just—I’m like a boy” (Miller 23).
To accentuate the boyish, callow natures of the three males in this dysfunctional
family and their lack of traditional manly characteristics, all of them are
portrayed as clean shaven. Linda Loman alludes to this when she describes
how the entire house smells of aftershave on the morning of Biff’s big interview
with Bill Oliver—“I can’t get over the shaving lotion in this house!”
(71). From Elia Kazan’s nonpareil original 1949 cast (with Lee J. Cobb as
Willy and Arthur Kennedy and Cameron Mitchell as Biff and Happy, respectively)
to the latest Broadway revival, every major production of Death of a
Salesman has presented this rudderless trio of New Yorkers as smooth-faced
and youthful looking—no beards, mustaches, goatees, or sideburns. Thus, in
the Loman household, the cheeks, chins, and upper lips of the males are
peachy, soft, and schoolboyish, punctuating their lack of real manhood, their
inability to assume the stressful societal roles assigned to grown males. In
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essence, the three Loman “boys,” despite their adult years, resemble aging and
clueless cubs in a world run by maned lions.
As smooth of face as a troika of Peter Pans, the dreams, desires, and personalities
of Willy, Biff, and Happy remain forever immature and impulsive,
juvenile and jejune. At a time in their lives when they should display
some modicum of stature and bearing in the world, the three surviving
twigs of the Loman family tree still exhibit the beardless cheeks of boyhood;
like eternal sophomores, they continue to believe that the greater
world will embrace them, will proclaim them, simply because they are
superficially charming, are occasionally witty, and can bluster and brag
with the best of them. At one point, because of their striking good looks,
athletic physiques, and youthful vigor, a proud Willy says of Biff and
Happy, “I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises. Because the
man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates
personal interest, is the man who gets ahead” (Miller 33). However, just like
their emotionally stunted father, the two boys never learn how to act their
age; they never learn to offer anything but an attractive surface in a competitive
business world that demands depth and ability from those who wish
to enter the fray. Hence, as a subtle but clear reinforcement of the trio’s boyish
lack of masculine gravitas, Miller portrays the three as clean shaven—
in stark contrast to the fully bearded Grandfather Loman and the handsomely
mustachioed Uncle Benjamin.
—TERRY W. THOMPSON, Georgia Southern University
WORKS CITED
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking, 1949.
Porter, Thomas. “Acres of Diamonds: Death of a Salesman.” Critical Essays on Arthur Miller.
Ed. James J. Martine. Boston: Hall, 1979. 24–43.
Kennedy’s ROSCOE
In the first six novels of his Albany cycle, William Kennedy anatomized the
underground life of his hometown of Albany, New York. The seventh novel of
this cycle, Roscoe (2002), extends his exploration of the city through the story
of Roscoe Conway, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer and political mastermind of
the Albany Democrats, who is trying to disentangle himself from the complications
of Albany life. Roscoe’s past, however, dominates his present, and
Kennedy thickens the retrospective atmosphere of the book by embedding a
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